‘Wanna buy a cheap re-charge?’

Electric cars may seem hot, but they could also be just a fad until something better comes along.

PHOTO: Cate Gillon, Getty Images

Where we end up may not be where we ought to go

By David Booth, Postmedia News

Originally published: April 1, 2011

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I wonder if this is going to end up like Betamax. For those of the YouTube generation for whom everything is digitally perfect, there were once these contraptions called videotapes. Admittedly large and clumsy compared with your iPods, iPads and iPhones, they were our generation’s only choice when it came to recording our, er, favourite moments. Look deep in your father’s sock drawer and you’ll likely find samples of these ancient artifacts, usually with the name Linda Lovelace or Ginger Lynn somehow attached to them.

What you won’t find, however, is one labelled Betamax. Betamax was Sony’s version of the classic tape format and was actually introduced before VHS. It was also, by many accounts, superior to JVC’s VHS format thanks to better picture quality and reliability (one thing the digital generation has never had to deal with is the frustration of your favourite tape tangling just as your favourite movie reaches its, shall we say, denouement). Yet, in less than a decade, Beta had disappeared and VHS owned the market until those infernal DVDs came along. All manner of reasons were given for the ascendance of JVC’s technology, the most common of which was superior editing and playback capabilities for professional videographers. What you won’t read in most MBA school case studies, though, is that possibly an even bigger reason for Beta’s demise was that Sony refused to license (or was late in licensing) the technology to the pornography industry, at the time the engine that drove “home movie” sales. Wherever the truth lies, it remains that a supposedly superior technology lost out to an inferior one for reasons that had nothing to do with consumer satisfaction or preference.

There, of course, have been thousands of such anomalies. Has society truly benefitted from the ubiquity of MacDonald’s? Why did Air Canada win and Canadian Airlines lose? And how many of us are really happy that Windows beat out Apple for world domination? Yet, before we knew it, we were all in the evil clutches of Bill Gates, inventor of the intermittent operating system, and “incalculable obstruction of port 58 in the sub-mainframe dialogue driver” was part of our daily lexicon.

I’m starting to get the same feeling about electric cars. Never mind that they will be, for now and the near future, as impractical as the pony express -useless in cold weather, limited in range and requiring frequent and prolonged resting/feeding breaks -many have taken up the siren call of supposedly emissions-free motoring and will not abide any questions of our electrified future. Never mind that the much-vaunted Better Place battery-swapping plan seems like nothing more than a Machiavellian scheme to gain control of all automotive battery manufacturing and thus, in a Bill Gates-like monopoly, the entire automotive industry. Never mind that superior, longer-term technology such as hydrogen fuel cells -which promise equally emissions-free and far more practical motoring -have been put on the back burner thanks to our obsession with anything electric. Ignore, even, the fact that this recent fascination with battery-powered cars is nothing new: Steamand electric-powered cars (automotive battery swapping was even tried as early as 1897) competed with the internal-combustion engine at the turn of the previous century and lost for the same reason they are inferior solutions today. We are forging ahead as if consumers will welcome, Windows-like, another inferior technology that will make all our lives smaller and more complicated. Google, for instance, recently added plugin vehicle charging station locations to its U.S. mapping service (type in “ev charging station near .” and you’ll be rewarded by the now familiar little balloons). Nissan is still promising hundreds of thousands of Leafs despite a dreadfully slow start to sales/production roll-out. Fisker edges closer to giving us an overpriced luxury EV, all thanks to an incredibly generous half-abillion-buck infusion from the U.S. federal government.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Prince Edward Island government has decommissioned two hydrogen-fuelled buses that were part of Charlottetown Transit for lack of federal subsidies. Sympatico. ca reports that fuel had to be trucked in from Quebec because local production, via wind turbines, was cut back due to lack of funding.

So the question remains: Will the auto industry evolve logically from gasoline-and diesel-fuelled cars to electric/ extended-range vehicles and, from there, on to hydrogen fuel cells that, with development time and money equal to what is being poured into EVs offer a more practical alternative to fossil fuels? Or will we all drink the Kool-Aid, rally to the EV’s promised illusion of pluperfect motoring and then find ourselves one day hunting down outlet “scalpers” skulking outside downtown parking lots, furtively offering quicker charging stations for but a modest (read exorbitant) surcharge and wondering how the hell we got here?